


river

by unicornpoe



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Pennywise (IT), Anal Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, Cuddling & Snuggling, Exes to Lovers, Getting Together, Holidays, Intercrural Sex, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Praise Kink, Richie Tozier Cries During Sex, Snowed In, Top Eddie Kaspbrak/Bottom Richie Tozier, if that's ur thing, oh boy here we go - Freeform, richie gets off on being loved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:07:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28004385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicornpoe/pseuds/unicornpoe
Summary: The thing—the thing is that Eddie hasn’t seen Richie in nearly five years.They’ve gotten good at avoiding each other. They alternate holidays and get-togethers, only showing up when they’re sure the other won’t be present. They’re still in the same fucking city but Eddie makes sure to shop on the other side of town from their old place where Richie still lives, makes sure not to go to any of Richie’s favorite restaurants or bars or cafes or goddamn park benches. Eddie doesn’t join in on the Losers’s group FaceTime sessions when he knows Richie’ll be joining, and Richie does the same for him.They couldn’t make their relationship work, but they’re fucking experts at being exes.*Eddie goes to spend the holidays at Bill and Mike's cabin in Vermont, and is surprised when Richie is already there. Things get worse when they're snowed in alone. Things get even more worse when Eddie remembers that he's still in love with him.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 36
Kudos: 321





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote the last half of this in a fury while waiting for evermore to drop. THAT is miss swift's power. 
> 
> anyway DON'T DO THIS and i love you and i hope you enjoy, happy holidays

_ It's coming on Christmas  
They're cutting down trees  
They're putting up reindeer  
And singing songs of joy and peace  
Oh, I wish I had a river  
I could skate away on _

_ -River, Joni Mitchell _

There’s only one car in the driveway when Eddie pulls up. 

It’s a shitty red Toyota, beat to hell and not fit for the kind of weather it must’ve driven through to get here: the long, winding driveway leading up to Mike and Bill’s secluded cabin in Vermont is a quagmire of icy slush, snow pushed up in drifts nearly two feet high on either side. The license plate of the Toyota is crooked, and there’s a scratch in the paint over the back left tire. 

There’s only one car in the driveway when Eddie pulls up, and he knows who it belongs to. 

*

“Mike,” Eddie had said two weeks ago, phone pressed to his ear as he stared at his own blanched-pale face beneath the fluorescent lights in the bathroom at work. “You know I can’t do that.”

His voice was soft when he answered Eddie, and that had made it worse. “I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t for Flo, Eddie. But it’s her first Christmas and I know she’ll want to look back at pictures and see all her aunts and uncles doting over her when she’s older.”

And, fuck. That’s a good argument. Mike and Bill’s daughter, Baby Flo, was born ten months ago, and Eddie has yet to find anything he wouldn’t do for her. 

Including, apparently, spending the Losers annual Christmas gathering with the ex he’s still in love with and all their friends who know. 

“I’ll understand if you can’t,” Mike continues when Eddie doesn’t answer. He doesn’t sound angry, because he’s kind and he probably doesn’t even feel that way: he can’t hide the disappointment though. And that’s even more powerful. Disappointing Mike Hanlon is one of the quickest ways for Eddie to hate himself. “But if you can, me and Bill and Flo and everybody else would love to have you. Even just for one day.”

Here’s the thing. 

The thing—the thing is that Eddie hasn’t seen Richie in nearly five years. 

They’ve gotten good at avoiding each other. They alternate holidays and get-togethers, only showing up when they’re sure the other won’t be present. They’re still in the same fucking city but Eddie makes sure to shop on the other side of town from their old place where Richie still lives, makes sure not to go to any of Richie’s favorite restaurants or bars or cafes or goddamn park benches. Eddie doesn’t join in on the Losers’s group FaceTime sessions when he knows Richie’ll be joining, and Richie does the same for him. 

They couldn’t make their relationship work, but they’re fucking experts at being exes.

“Vermont, you said?” Eddie says at last, even though Bill and Mike have been going up to Bill’s parent’s cabin every Christmas since they were married, the Losers in tow. Eddie’s been most years—except, of course, when it’s Richie’s turn. 

Mike’s smile is clear in his voice. “Yeah, Eddie,” he says. “I can send you the address if you want. And you can pick the day you wanna visit—although you’re obviously welcome to stay the whole time if you’d like! We’d love you to stay the whole time.” 

Eddie would rather drive into the Vermont wilderness and let the elements take him than stay the whole time. “I’ll come up the first day,” he says, trying not to sound like he’s dying here in this shitty little bathroom. It’s not Mike’s fault he wants his family to have a normal fucking holiday with all of them there. It’s not Mike’s fault he wants his baby to grow up with a functional family who loves her more than they dread the idea of seeing the one person they want more than anything in the world, but know they can't have. “Thanks, Mikey.”

*

Now, Eddie stops his own car—four wheel drive, snow tires, he’s not an idiot—in the middle of the driveway without bothering to pull up into the carport, reaching for his phone where it’s been tucked away neatly in his dock while he drove. He presses Mike’s name with a stabbing finger. 

It rings for entirely too long. Eddie watches the cabin as his heart pounds, eyes fixed on the yellow light he can see on in the kitchen. 

“Our fucking f-f-flight got delayed,” says Bill instead of answering. “We texted you but Mike figured you were driving— “

“Why the fuck is Richie here so early?”

Eddie’s voice comes out louder than he’d meant, sharper. Bill goes quiet on the other end of Mike’s phone, and the noises of a packed-full airport filter across the line. 

“Sorry,” Eddie says, quieter. His free hand grips the steering wheel tight enough that his nails bite into the leather. He lets go. “Sorry, Bill. Didn’t mean to yell.”

“That’s ok, Eddie,” Bill says. Eddie can hear Mike murmuring something to him, but he can’t make out the words. “We texted you that, too.” 

Eddie’s life is a fucking tragedy. 

“Sure,” he says. A shadow passes across the kitchen window—a tall, broad, Richie-shaped shadow—and Eddie full-body flinches, fight or flight instincts kicking in like  _ woah.  _ “I—so, I can’t stay here. Obviously. Where is everybody else? Why—ok. Gotta go.”

“Wait wait wait,” Bill rushes, as Eddie shifts back into drive. “Mike and Flo and I are catching the next flight we can, so we’ll hopefully be up there later today, and I know Ben and Bev and Patty and Stan are landing this evening. You won’t be alone more than a couple of hours. C’mon, Eddie. P-p-please stay.”

Eddie shuts his eyes tight, lowering his head down until it’s an inch from his steering wheel and then banging it softly enough that he’s pretty sure Bill can’t hear. 

The rest of the Losers just don’t understand. He knows they try, because they’re good like that, but there’s no way they can fully grasp why it’s so enormously shattering for Eddie to see Richie now when they’re all living their idyllic little lives in pairs like they are. The only one who understands is… well. Richie. 

“Flo misses you,” Bill wheedles softly. 

Ah, fuck. Metaphorically sniped by a baby. 

“How many hours, Bill,” Eddie mutters. 

“I’m gonna say four,” Bill says. He’s trying to keep his tone even, but Eddie can hear his excitement. He’s always been shit at keeping his feelings under wraps. “Four sounds reasonable.”

“I’m not doing this for you,” he says, sitting up. “I’m doing this for Flo and  _ only _ —”

Movement on the porch catches his eye. He looks up, and then he freezes. 

“Fuck,” he says, shaky, “Fuck, Bill—I gotta go.”

“Eddie? Are you—”

He hangs up with unsteady hands, eyes never leaving the shocked-wide ones meeting his own. 

Somehow Eddie shifts his car into gear, drives the last few feet until he’s parked in next to Richie’s Toyota. Eddie’s mouth is dry. Eddie’s can taste his heartbeat on the back of his tongue. 

His feet are loud when they meet the driveway, loafers crunching gravel and snow and mud. The slam of his car door is even louder. It is silent out here in the woods, the sky slate gray, the wind and animal sounds muffled by the banks around them. He forces himself to take a step forward toward the porch, and another, and another… 

And then he’s at the bottom of the steps, chin tipped up, gaze steady. 

“Shit,” says Richie. 

It’s a shock, hearing his voice after all this time. The roughness of it rips through Eddie like wildfire. 

Eddie doesn’t know what sort of sound is going to come out of him until it does, and he isn’t sure if it’s a good thing when that sound is a laugh. It’s dry and short and sharp. It lands in the space between them and dies there. 

“Shit,” Eddie agrees. 

Richie looks… god.  _ God,  _ he looks like everything Eddie’s seen every time he closes his eyes these last five years. He looks like himself. Tall and broad and soft in an ugly, block-pattern sweater Eddie remembers halfheartedly hating way back in the day. The wide sweep of his jaw, those blue eyes behind his Buddy Holly glasses. 

Maybe his hair’s a little longer, curled down around the nape of his neck, and maybe it’s going gray at the temples; maybe he stands there like a shepherd's hook, his shoulders tucked in close, doing everything he can to make himself as small as possible. Maybe there are a few more wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, laugh lines beside his mouth. 

_ I should have been the one to give you those,  _ Eddie thinks. 

He’s Richie. He’s Richie, and Eddie still loves him, and Eddie can’t do this. 

“Eddie,” Richie says. He still looks stunned, his eyes huge behind his glasses, his mouth a soft shape of surprise. Did they not tell him Eddie was coming? At Richie’s sides his hands flex restlessly, like he’s reaching out for something Eddie can’t see. “You’re early.”

Jesus. The guy looks devastated. Eddie gets it. 

“Yeah,” he says, pushing past his heart which has made a home in his throat, burying his own hands in his coat pockets so Richie can’t see them tremble. “I like to be on time, so I…”

Richie is very pale beneath the slight scruff on his chin and jaw. Looking closer, Eddie sees how dark the skin beneath his eyes is, dull and bruised—maybe he hasn’t slept well during the weeks leading up to this either. He’s always been just as eager not to see Eddie as Eddie has been not to see him, and Richie’s fucking terrible at handling awkward social things. His anxiety is even worse than Eddie’s. 

Eddie wants to lead him inside and make him a cup of tea so he’ll get to sleep easy. But that isn’t Eddie’s job anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time. 

“I know you do,” Richie says quietly. 

Eddie’s getting a crick in his neck looking up at Richie like this, and his cheeks and nose are freezing in the frigid air. He can’t imagine how Richie feels out here in just a sweater and joggers. Idiot. 

Abruptly, Eddie turns away. “Right,” he says. He feels like a china doll, fractured along all his surfaces. Like he’s gonna splinter apart if he’s bumped. “I’ve gotta unpack, so—”

“Oh, I’ll help you,” Richie says, and before Eddie can react he’s hopping down the three steps between them and opening Eddie’s trunk. 

Richie heaves out Eddie’s suitcase with ease. He unloads the trunk like it’s what he was born to do, wordless, very intently not looking at Eddie. 

Eddie watches him. The movement of his shoulders, the dip of his spine. 

Richie’s setting it down when the wind picks up around them, shaking snow out of the enormous conifers that surround the property down onto their heads. He shivers sharply. 

There’s something about it that forces Eddie to find his voice. “Rich,” he says, softer than he meant to—softer than he should—and touches the curve of Richie’s elbow. 

Richie jolts, head smacking the trunk that hangs open above him, and stumbles back a few steps. He stares at Eddie. He’s still pale but he’s blushing now, bright pink smudged on his cheeks and his neck and the tops of his ears. 

“Jesus,” Eddie says. He’s staring, too. 

Richie had been warm beneath his hand. 

“Go the fuck inside,” Eddie says. Harsh. Making up for the way every cell of him wants to reach out again and pull Richie into his arms. “You shouldn’t be out here without a coat on, it’s like the goddamn Arctic.”

“Well excuse me,” Richie shoots back. “I didn’t know you were gonna grace me with your presence so soon, Eds.”

Eddie’s chest goes tight. “Don’t call me that,” he snaps. 

Richie’s mouth, which had been slowly pulling into a shape almost like a smile—that wide, obnoxious, lovely one, that one that always came out when they bickered—crumples down small. He cuts his gaze away from Eddie’s. 

Immediately Eddie feels like the worst guy in the world. Like he just kicked a puppy or something. 

_ I didn’t want to let you go,  _ he thinks.  _ I almost walked after you a thousand times.  _

“Shit,” Eddie says, and it comes out on a sigh. “Just… let’s just get inside. We can talk then.”

Richie nods, short. He takes the suitcase in one hand, leaving Eddie to lock the car. 

The warmth of the cabin hits Eddie like a wall as they enter and he sighs once more, out of relief this time. He shrugs out of his coat as Richie sets his suitcase down in the hallway, pushed neatly back against the wall. 

“I was making coffee when you pulled up,” Richie says. He hasn’t met Eddie’s eyes since Eddie snapped at him. Eddie wants to crowd him back against the door and tuck his nose in that soft place at the dip of Richie’s throat. “Want a cup?”

It’s nearly five, but there’s no way Eddie’ll be sleeping tonight anyway. “Sure,” he says. 

The kitchen looks largely unused except for the coffee pot, which Richie crosses to as soon as they enter. Eddie wonders what time Richie got in. Eddie wonders if Richie’s eaten yet. 

_ Not your job,  _ Eddie thinks again. Vicious this time. 

Maybe it’ll stick. 

He isn’t paying attention as Richie pours their coffee, too caught up in his own thoughts, so when Richie hands a mug to him and the coffee inside iss just the right tawny shade of brown, Eddie hasn’t had time to steel himself.

Eddie stares down at it. Up at Richie. Neither of them has let go. 

“You remember how I take my coffee,” he says quietly. 

Richie shrugs, awkward in the way only he can be. “No sugar and just a dash of cream,” he says. “S’not like that’s too difficult to remember, Eddie Spaghetti, even for lil ole me.”

They’re standing close now, close enough to breathe the same air. Richie looks so tired, and Eddie wants him so bad. 

“Right,” Eddie says. Someone has taken a rope and bound him across the chest, squeezed until he hurts deep in a place that he has no hope of reaching. “No, of course not.”

They move to the living room, sitting on either end of Mike and Bill’s overstuffed sofa so there’s about four feet of space between them. There’s a flatscreen TV mounted across the room, and the dark surface catches the reflection of the fireplace, throws it back in their direction. It casts the angels of Richie’s face deep in shadow; lights up the frame of his glasses, his hair. 

“I guess you know Bill and Mike’s flight got delayed,” Richie says finally. He’s holding his mug between his thighs, big hands wrapped around the rim; Eddie forces himself to look away from the broadness of his palms. The width of his wrists. “And everybody else isn’t gonna get in until tonight. And I’ll stay out of the way, so like.” He smiles weakly. “You should survive.”

There’s something about all of this that’s making him feel faintly sick.  _ Stay with me,  _ he wants to say.  _ Let me stay with you.  _

“You don’t have to worry about that, man,” he says, forcing his voice to keep even. “I’m kinda tired after my drive, so I’ll probably just…”

It’s a big fucking lie. Eddie is never going to sleep again, if the amount of adrenaline pumping through his system means anything. 

He just needs some space. 

“Oh,” Richie says. Eddie watches the movement of his throat as he swallows. “Sure, yeah, that makes… right. Ok.”

“So I’ll…” Eddie stands, coffee in hand. “Uh. Let me know when the others get here.”

Richie isn’t a small man, but something about him looks that way as he watches Eddie leave the room. His sloped shoulders, the weariness dragging at his limbs. 

It makes Eddie pause, heart tripping. 

“You should try to get some sleep too, Rich,” he murmurs. Richie blinks up at him, heavy-eyed and surprised again, like he doesn’t expect Eddie to care. That hurts. Eddie has always cared about him—that’s the whole reason they’re in this situation after all. “You look exhausted.”

“Oh,” says Richie again. He always used to be so loud, so colorful. This quiet hesitation is wrong on him. Wrong like a punch. “Maybe I will, Eddie. Thanks.”

Eddie nods. And then he flees. 

It isn’t until Eddie’s out of the room that he realizes he didn’t grab his luggage. That’s fine. He isn’t about to go back in there. To face Richie alone again. 

He takes the first free guest room he finds, and he closes the door. 

*

They had broken up in a late-night conversation, curled around each other in bed and hating the thought of letting go. 

Richie had just gotten back from a tour, and as soon as he finished his Netflix special he was in the middle of filming he was going to embark on another one. His manager was talking about adding international dates, talking about extending the tour for another month, two. Eddie was rising in the ranks of his own job, making a name for himself in his field, rooted firmly in one location. He  _ missed  _ Richie when he was gone, hated it—but he hated the idea of holding Richie back more. 

Neither of them could bear the idea of being the thing that made the other one miserable.

“I want you to be happy,” Richie had told him. 

“You make me happy,” Eddie had said, and he’d meant it—he  _ means  _ it—but even then, he could tell where they were headed. 

They just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t be the reason their partner didn’t follow their dreams. 

Eddie had moved out by the end of the week. 

*

There’s a knock on Eddie’s door. 

It brings him out of the doze he’d apparently been able to fall into: he blinks his eyes open blearily, sitting up on top of the still-made bed he’s in. The sky outside his parted curtains is dark. Evening, then. With a smile—his first of the day, probably—he realizes that the others are likely here now. 

“Yeah, come on in,” he calls, and stands—Jesus, his fucking shoes are still on—and stretches his arms over his head, cracking his spine. 

Richie pokes his head in through the doorway, and Eddie’s stomach flips neatly over itself. Richie’s hair is a mess, standing up on the top and sides like he’s been running his fingers through it, but he doesn’t look like he’s slept. He looks… nervous. 

Oh no. 

Eddie groans out loud, pinching the place at the bridge of his nose where a headache has immediately surfaced. “Don’t tell me,” he says. 

Richie winces. “Sorry, Eds—Eddie.” He shakes his head a little. “Bill and Mike and Flo can’t even get a flight until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest, and everybody else stopped for the night at the base of the mountain.” He jerks his head toward the window. “It’s pretty nasty out there.”

Eddie crosses to his window without answering, pulling the curtains back completely. 

Richie’s right. What little of the yard Eddie can see in the darkness is covered in what looks like at least a foot more of snow than what was out there earlier in the afternoon, and the air is dense with flakes that are still falling. He can’t see the treeline or even the moon through the storm. 

“Fuck,” Eddie swears, and yanks the curtains closed again. “God _ damnit. _ ” 

This is bad. This is so remarkably, laughably bad. He’s stuck in a picturesque cabin with the love of his goddamn life who he can’t even look at without wanting to throw himself off of a very tall building. Somebody call Bill Denbrough, because here’s the shittiest ending anybody could hope to think of. 

“Surprised you haven’t tried to jump in that sporty little car of yours and motor on out of here,” Richie says behind him. 

He sounds wry, but there’s also something like resignation to the words. Eddie turns around. 

“I can’t drive in this weather, I’m not a fucking idiot,” Eddie says briskly, and then—and he looks at the way Richie’s holding himself, brittle-boned and tense like he’s just waiting for something to fall on top of him. He lets himself soften. “Plus I don’t… I don’t hate you, Rich. You know that.”

Richie smiles, but it looks more like pain than happiness. He asks, a waver in his voice, “Do I?”

Oh god. Oh what the hell. 

Eddie is across the room before he thinks about it, an ache nestled in the wing of his ribs. “Richie,” he says. He’s touching Richie’s wrist, his forearm, and he knows he shouldn’t, he knows—but Richie looks so sad. And Eddie can’t have that. “Rich. Of course I don’t. Of course. I never have—I don’t think I possibly could.”

Close like this Eddie can feel the heat of him, radiating toward Eddie in waves. Eddie wants to kiss the lines in Richie’s forehead, and the frown at the corners of his mouth. Eddie wants to kiss him. 

“That’s good to know,” Richie says. His voice is small, and it’s all so  _ wrong.  _ Richie should be big and bold and loud, expansive gestures and a smile brighter than any star Eddie’s ever seen. Sunshine in the form of a man. “I don’t hate you either, Eds. Just. In case you were wondering.”

Eddie has wondered, off and on through the years. He knows they didn’t end things that way—knows they ended things specifically so things wouldn’t  _ become _ that way—but he also knows that it isn’t impossible that Richie could’ve grown to hate him sometime in the past half a decade. They spent five years of their life together before they split up. Anybody else would see that as a waste of time. 

He smiles gently now, hoping it’s more real than Richie’s had seemed. “Thanks, Rich.”

Richie laughs again, soft. Eddie’s not sure why. He doesn’t ask. 

His hand is still on Richie’s arm, thumb tracking gently over the bump of his wrist that sticks out beneath a shirtsleeve. In another life, this is where he’d pull Richie in, a hand at his hip and one on the back of his neck; in another life he’d kiss him here, kiss him until he’s smiling, and then he’d lead Richie back to the bed and press him down into the mattress— 

“I’ve missed you,” Richie murmurs. He’s looking down at the place where Eddie touches him, his jaw tense as if he’s holding something back with the clench of it. “I really have.”

That hits Eddie. A punch to the sternum. He says, “Richie,” low and wanting, and then he can’t say anything else. 

“I know,” Richie says. He takes an unsteady breath. Eddie can hear it hitch in his lungs, lodged behind his breastbone. “I know, Eds.”

They’re quiet. Without putting too much thought into it Eddie lifts his hand and brushes his thumb over the hinge of Richie’s jaw, soothing out the tension. 

Richie’s eyes sink shut at the touch. His skin is warm and soft, his stubble rasping a little at the pad of Eddie’s thumb. Eddie goes to pull away but Richie sways close to him, presses into both hands, so Eddie breathes in and Eddie leaves them where they are. 

Eddie wraps bravery around him like a cape. Murmurs, “I missed you too.”

“I would have—it wasn’t—” Richie opens his eyes and looks at him, looks at him, and there’s something desperate in his voice. “I wouldn’t want things to be like this,” he says at last, on a whisper. “If we could do them again.”

Eddie’s turn to quiet him. “I know,” he murmurs. “I know.”

*

Richie cooks them dinner while Eddie drags his suitcase into the room he’s chosen and unpacks everything. 

It doesn’t take long. He had thought he was only gonna be here for a day and a night, he’d packed accordingly: all he’s got are the clothes he’s wearing now, a set of pajamas in case the set of matching pajamas Patty always buys all the Losers for a group photo don’t fit him, and clothes to fly home in tomorrow. 

Hopefully he won’t be here much longer than that. 

If there is any mercy in this fucking shithole of a life he won’t be here any longer than that. 

He pulls out his phone and calls Mike, not even bothering to tell himself it’s anything but a way to stall. 

“God, Eddie, I’m so sorry,” Mike says as soon as he picks up. The background noise on this call is a lot more muted than it was when Eddie talked to Bill earlier. The sound low rumble of voices, like a TV turned on low. “We really didn’t know the weather was gonna get this bad.”

“Mikey, it’s not your fault,” Eddie says, and tries to keep his voice as calm as possible. It  _ isn’t  _ Mike’s fault, just like it isn’t the fault of the rest of them. It’s Eddie’s fault for always being so fucking anal about everything and needing to arrive early everywhere he goes out of some bizarre sense of control. It’s the twenty-first century, he’s got a therapist, he knows the drill. “Don’t worry about it, ok? It’s gonna be… we’ll survive.”

Mike huffs out a laugh. “Will you?” he asks. “I know how you two get.”

Their fights have always been legendary, on a performative, childish kind of level. Sometimes Eddie used to think he never loved Richie as much as he did when they were ribbing each other about something, squabbling back and forth with no stakes hanging over them, their legs tangled together or their arms around their shoulders. 

Now Eddie knows he just loves him. Plain and complete. 

“I’m still in love with him, Mike,” Eddie says simply. “And we broke things off specifically so we wouldn’t ever get angry. He just seems… he just seems so tired. I’m not gonna…”

Mike is quiet for a long time. “Eddie,” he says at last, tentative in a way he never is. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that he still loves you, too. I think it’s likely, actually.”

“Mike,” Eddie says, “with all due respect, I cannot fucking hear that right now.”

“Ok,” Mike says easily. There’s the bright, indistinct sound of Flo’s cry in the background which has Eddie frowning all over again. He was really looking forward to seeing her on this trip. Fuck his whole entire life. “I get it. Listen, Eddie, I gotta go, but—”

“Don’t worry about us,” Eddie says. “Tell Flo I love her.”

“What about Bill?”

“Fuck Bill,” Eddie says, and then, “Love you guys.”

“Bye, Eddie. Love you too.”

He hangs up. 

There’s really no other reason to keep putting it off now. 

The smell of whatever Richie’s cooking is what hits Eddie first, savory enough that his empty stomach growls as he breathes it in. He moves down the hallway slowly, inhaling, and then he’s standing in the doorway of the kitchen and Richie’s there.

He’s humming softly to himself as he stirs a pot on the stovetop. It’s a tuneless, idle little melody, rumbled low in the back of his throat, and it makes Eddie’s entire being sore with the reality of how fucking  _ familiar _ this all is. This scene which he’s come home to a million times in the past: Richie in an apron that’s a little too small for him, tied over his sweater with a loopy knot, Richie humming to himself, Richie bobbing his head along gently to a rhythm that only he knows.  _ Home,  _ Eddie’s brain supplies as he watches Richie lick tomato sauce off of a big wooden spoon. 

“Tell me you aren’t going to put that back in the pot,” Eddie says. He only sounds slightly breathless. 

Richie, always one to startle easy, jumps at the sound of Eddie’s voice. “Oh,” he says, and clutches his chest. “Spaghetti, you’re so sneaky.”

_ Spaghetti.  _ God, he’s annoying. Eddie wants to kiss that faint grin right the fuck off his face. 

“I’m not sneaky, you’re oblivious,” Eddie shoots back. He eases his way into the kitchen immediately, moving closer to Richie subconsciously. They’re magnets, the two of them. “What were you singing?”

“Nothing,” Richie says, and then seems to reconsider. “That song from  _ Frozen 2. _ ” 

“Huh.” Eddie crosses his arms, leans a hip against the counter. “Bad movie.”

Richie’s grin widens. 

“Oh, fuck off,” Eddie mutters. “I watched it with Baby Flo at Thanksgiving.”

“Aw,” Richie says, and it’s a joke but it isn’t, not really. The arch of his eyebrows is gentle and too invested for it to be a joke. “Eds, that’s sweet.”

Richie drains the pasta over the sink, and Eddie doesn’t let his gaze linger on the muscles in his forearms. “Not that sweet,” he says. “She’s pretty hard to say no to.”

“She’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen and I love her so much and anyone who tries to hurt her will die by my sword,” says Richie valiantly, dumping the pasta into a bowl and setting it aside so he can hold his hands out, cupped, before Eddie. “Last time I saw her I swear she could fit right here in my hands.”

For a moment Eddie is so overwhelmed by the thought of Richie’s enormous hands and arms and—and  _ self _ —holding a little baby with the care Eddie knows he’d afford her that he forgets to school his expression. He must make a face: Richie smiles at him again, tilting and endearingly eager and slightly flustered. He says, “But I haven’t seen her in a while, so I’m not sure.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. His throat is dry.  _ I missed you,  _ Richie had told him.  _ I wouldn’t want things to be like this, if we could do them again.  _ “Hopefully we’ll see them all soon.”

They don’t eat at Bill and Mike’s wide, rustic dining room table—they don’t talk about it but that table is for family meals, for the Losers, not just two awkward men with enough tension between them to drown somebody—opting for the couch instead. 

Eddie turns on the television as soon as they’ve sat down, flipping until he finds a channel playing those stupid made-for-TV movies that he can turn down low in the background so the silence doesn’t pull them under. He tucks his legs beneath himself, balancing his plate on his knees. 

He can tell Richie’s watching him. He doesn’t let himself watch back. 

“This is good, Rich,” Eddie says after a couple minutes of relative quiet. He’s being honest: Richie’s always been the better cook between them, even before they were dating back in college. Eddie can barely make toast. “Thanks.”

“Sure thing, Eds,” Richie says, and for some reason Eddie breaks his own rule and turns to him. 

He’s looking at Eddie with those tired eyes. Eddie almost wishes that they  _ did  _ hate each other: that they could spend these next few days hiding away in their respective rooms without seeking each other out like the sun, prodding at the bruise of whatever leftover thing there is between them. If Eddie could just be indifferent, even, this would all be so much easier. 

Eddie’s never been indifferent toward Richie since he met him fifteen years ago. 

Richie slips him an awkward smile when Eddie doesn’t look away. He says, softly, “I wish we’d kept in touch.”

Eddie’s fingers go tight around his fork. He says, “Richie.”

Richie laughs. It’s the horrible one from before, too hard and too hopeless. Wrong-shaped in his mouth. “I called you a couple times but you never answered.”

He remembers. The first call came a week after he moved out, when he was sitting in his empty-little cell of a walkup with the gray walls pressing in on him like stone. He’d stared at Richie’s name across his screen, at his contact photo, and eventually the call had dropped. 

The same thing happened each time. Eventually, Richie stopped calling. 

“Of course I didn’t,” Eddie says. Too loud, too sharp. The fork cuts into his palm. 

Richie’s jaw flexes again the way it did earlier, like he’s holding something in. He sets his own plate aside. “It would’ve been nice to at least know why,” he says, low. “You didn’t have to—fucking ghosting me wasn’t the best way to go about letting me know you never wanted to speak again. I worried about you, Eddie.” His voice goes unsteady for a moment. Eddie can’t breathe. “I didn’t know if you hated me or if you were… were fucking dead in a ditch somewhere. I didn’t exactly love either option.”

“Well excuse me for not being ready to hear your voice immediately,” Eddie gets out. 

Richie’s lips are white. “You could’ve at least let me know you were alive.”

“Richie,  _ we broke up, _ ” Eddie says. He doesn’t realize he’s standing until he’s already on his feet, doesn’t realize his hands are shaking until he has to curl them into fists at his sides. “What the fuck did you think it was going to be like?”

It goes silent. 

Richie looks like Eddie could reach down and break him into pieces. Brittle and see-through and stunned. 

Something terrible is clawing at the column of Eddie’s throat. 

“Shit,” Richie breathes. His voice cracks, and he has to swallow and start again. “Shit. Guess I really am an idiot, aren’t I?”

He stands, a little unsteady, and pushes past Eddie. 

“Rich—” Eddie starts. His eyes are burning. He can’t—he can’t— 

“Night, Eddie,” Richie says tightly. He doesn’t look back as he leaves the room. 

Goddamnit. 

Eddie sits down on the edge of the couch, head in his hands. 

*

Eddie can’t sleep. 

He stares up at the ceiling above his bed, the rustic, exposed beams dim and ill-defined in the dark. His curtains are closed tight, but even if they weren’t it would be pitch dark in here. The snow hasn’t stopped falling since this afternoon. 

Every time Eddie closes his eyes he sees Richie’s face. 

Eddie hates that he came here. Eddie hates that he left him. 

It isn’t a decision when he sits up, swings his legs over the side of the bed, slips down onto the winter-chill floor. It isn’t a decision when he moves through the velvet-darkness of the cabin with ease, crossing the hallway between their rooms and coming to stand before Richie’s door. 

There’s light spilling out beneath the bottom. Softly, Eddie knocks. 

A moment of silence, and then a shuffle, the squeak of mattress springs, someone’s quiet-cleared throat: “Come in.”

Richie is sitting on the edge of his bed when Eddie opens the door, his elbows on his knees, his head hanging between his shoulders. He looks up, and Eddie’s breath catches. 

“Hey,” Eddie murmurs, feeling horrible and sharp and mean and guilty, guilty, guilty. 

Richie is in an old sleepshirt and plaid pajama bottoms with a hole at the hem. The slope of his shoulders is soft and dejected; he looks up at Eddie, half his face is in shadow again. Eddie sees nothing but the downturn of his mouth, the glint of his eyes. 

Eddie takes another step inside—and it’s like there’s a string between them, one end wrapped tight around each of them, that cinches at Eddie’s skin and hauls him closer. He wants to touch Richie with a force that comes from outside of himself. 

“Richie,” Eddie says, because that’s what he always does, that is the word that his tongue and teeth feel safe making, the one that rests in his cheek like an egg in a nest, “Richie, god, I’m so. I’m fucking sorry.” 

He watches Richie move. The shrug is heavy, leaves him sunk into himself. His spine is a question mark. 

There was a time that Eddie would have been the answer. He’s not so narcissistic as to think that’s the case any longer. 

But fuck, he wants to be. 

“I don’t think I’m angry at you,” Richie says. His voice is a husk. Another step in, two, three, six, and now Eddie could reach out and take Richie’s chin in his hands if that was allowed, could trace the dip of his mouth and his blunt square chin. “I—I know I’m not, Eds, and that’s the fucking problem. I never—I just  _ want you,  _ Eddie baby, and that’s the fucking rub.” 

Eddie is touching him now, and he doesn’t remember doing it. A hand on Richie’s cheek, one wound in those small silky curls at the nape of his neck.

“Can I tell you something?” Eddie asks him. His own voice shakes in the middle. “Can I—Rich, I walked out. You haven’t been mine to want back in a long fucking time. I couldn’t call you. I couldn’t—I can’t have you.”

“Eddie,” Richie says, a whisper, and aching. His eyes are wet, but he smiles, resigned and torn up. “I never loved anybody before you and I’ll never love anybody after.” Another shrug. Like he didn’t just slice Eddie through. “I’m—I’m always gonna be yours to have, Eds. Whatever way you want me.” 

Richie turns his face into Eddie’s palm, slow enough that his stubble rasps against Eddie’s skin. He presses his mouth there to the center and Eddie’s fingers unfold like a blossom, Eddie’s whole hand tingles, Eddie’s heart jackhammers at his breastbone and Richie’s lips are warm and dry and soft on his lifeline. 

Richie is still, his eyes pressed closed. He has a hand on Eddie’s hip and one curled around his wrist, loose, like he’ll let Eddie go if he pulls away. 

Eddie isn’t going to pull away. 

“Richie,” Eddie murmurs. Low. Something from the root of him. “Sweetheart.”

Richie’s pulse throbs visibly in the hollow of his throat.

Hand steady, Eddie guides Richie’s face toward him as he leans down. He rests his forehead against Richie’s. Feels the heat of him. 

He thinks they might both be shaking a little. Eddie loves him so much, and it’s been so long. 

Richie breathes, “Please.”

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” Eddie soothes, and somehow, unfathomably, he does. He strokes his fingers through Richie’s hair and then he steps completely into the cradle of Richie’s thighs and he brushes his lips against Richie’s. 

Richie goes tense against him for a moment—just a moment, a moment of shock, a moment of strange and singing grief—and then boneless, a shuddering sigh that has Eddie sliding an arm around Richie’s waist and gathering him close. 

He kisses Richie again, again, again. A little deeper each time. When he goes in with parted lips, meets Richie’s warm, open mouth with his own, Richie makes a sound like a tiny moan. 

Eddie thinks,  _ I will be gentle with you,  _ the thought as bright and as blazing as a star. 

“Eds…” Richie trails off, eyes heavy-lidded and dark as Eddie’s mouth travels over the cut of his jaw.  _ Jesus _ , his fucking jaw. His fucking—all of him. He’s the most beautiful thing Eddie’s ever seen. 

“Hm?” Eddie murmurs. He pulls back an inch, meets Richie’s glimmer-dark gaze; his glasses are sliding crooked down his nose and his cheeks are flushed pink. Eddie feels wild, stirred up deep, like there’s parts of himself that he can’t hold in. He mouths at the heat in Richie’s cheeks and Richie makes another of those small, bruised-up sounds. 

“I missed you,” Eddie says, “Richie,” and he tugs very lightly at his handful of Richie’s curls, just to see his eyes slam all the way closed and his lips part. “I missed you so fucking bad.”

“Missed you too,” Richie breathes. His hands are on Eddie’s waist, enormous, thumbs tucked up over his hip bones and fingers nearly meeting at Eddie’s spine. It’s devastatingly hot. The last five years of Eddie’s life have been worse than any of the ones before them. “Every day. God, fuck, Eddie—” 

Eddie ends kneeling on the edge of the mattress, knees on either side of Richie’s hips, angling his head down so their mouths slide together easy and slow, so the heave of Richie’s chest as he breathes presses right up against Eddie’s. Eddie aches to feel his heartbeat. Aches to keep it on his tongue like a plum. Eddie aches to taste him all over, aches to have Richie Tozier under his skin, in his bloodstream, his cells mixed with Eddie’s cells. To know him completely, as he did once before. 

“I want—” Richie starts, breathing fast. He’s holding Eddie against him like he’ll slip away, intangible as a dream. Eddie is dizzy with him. “I want—”

“I know,” Eddie says, “Sweetheart, I know.”

He slips off of Eddie’s lap, soothing him with a stroke to his broad thigh as he reaches out reflexively, big hands flexing. It breaks Eddie’s heart. 

God, they were stupid all those years ago. God, Eddie should have stayed. 

Eddie forces the thought away. It doesn’t matter. He didn’t stay, but he’s back now. He’s got Richie now. 

And he’s gonna take care of him. 

Richie watches Eddie like a goddamn movie as Eddie helps him slip his pajama bottoms off of his hips. He isn’t wearing underwear, and Eddie kisses the soft inside of his thigh for that, the sweet-secret place that makes Richie mew like a kitten when Eddie greets it with a hint of teeth. 

Eddie does. Richie does. Eddie catches Richie’s hand when it reaches again, almost lost, and kisses the inside of his wrist. 

“Eds,” Richie gets out, choked and high and shattered. “God, Eddie baby, you’re killing me.”

Eddie finds himself smiling. He threads his fingers through Richie’s and then ducks his head back down, noses at the seam of his hip, feels his heart clench. 

They used to make it into a bit of a game sometimes: Eddie’d tease Richie a little, touch all but the places where Richie wanted him, see how long Richie could last. They liked it: it was fun, and fucking sexy, and made it all the sweeter when Richie finally did let go and come beneath Eddie’s hands or tongue or on his cock. 

It isn’t the time for that now. It’s been so long, and Eddie finds that he wants to give Richie everything. 

When he swallows Richie down Richie keens, high and reedy and perfect, the kind of sound that goes straight to Eddie’s belly in a flash of heat. He is heavy on Eddie’s tongue, just as Eddie remembers; Eddie closes his eyes and takes Richie a little deeper, feeling how hard he is, tasting the way he’d already started to leak before Eddie even got his mouth on him. 

God, Eddie loves him. Eddie wants to make him feel good until the day he dies.

“Eddie,” Richie gasps, a hand in Eddie’s hair, “Eddie, Eds, Eddie, stop, I’m gonna—”

Eddie pulls off with a wet sound, wiping his mouth on the back of his wrist and leaning back on his heels. He keeps his left hand tangled up with Richie’s. An anchorpoint. 

Richie gazes down at him, his breath in shreds. He looks wrecked. He looks like everything Eddie’s ever wanted. His eyes are wide and wet and he tugs at Eddie, tugs him up up up until he can kiss him. 

Richie is clumsy with pleasure, his mouth soft and wet. It’s uncoordinated and messy. It’s perfect. Eddie guides him down flat, climbs on top of him, rocks his clothed hips down into Richie’s naked thigh and bites back a moan at the shivering wave of bliss that rolls through him.

“Off,” Richie says, tugging at Eddie’s sweats. “Off, please…”

He manages it somehow, his brain a blanket of white noise, nothing but a repetition of  _ Richie, Richie, Richie  _ to break up the haze. He climbs back atop Richie and gets his mouth on the tendons in his neck, kissing the salt-sharpness of his skin. He rolls his hips against Richie, gasping when their cocks slide together, and is wholly unprepared when Richie murmurs, “I want you to fuck me.”

It hits him like a lightning strike. “ _ God, _ ” he says, “god, Rich.”

He pushes himself up with one arm, just looking down at Richie. Richie, who looks back with his pupils blown huge, lips parted enough that Eddie can see the glint of his slightly-crooked teeth behind them. Richie, sweat at his temples and a flush on his cheek and neck that Eddie knows leads all the way down to his chest, his stomach. 

“Or not,” Richie says after Eddie’s been silent too long. He’s still breathing sharp, still hard against Eddie’s hip, but his eyes slide away from Eddie’s. “Or anything, Eddie, just—”

“I want to,” Eddie says. His own voice surprises him. Low, punched-out. Stripped bald, bare. “God, I want to so fucking bad, but my condoms are in my room and I’m absolutely not letting go of you that long.”

Richie’s face does something complicated. His skin goes a shade more red, he smiles and then frowns in quick succession—and then he fucking  _ laughs.  _

“Sorry,” he says, “shit, sorry, Eddie, just… you brought condoms to a cabin in Vermont where you were gonna be staying with all your married friends and your  _ ex. _ ”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, shoving him lightly in the shoulder. He leaves his palm pressed there, soaking up the warmth of Richie’s skin through the thin fabric of his t-shirt. He is embarrassed, indignant, in love. “I like to be prepared.”

Richie’s expression is so fond that Eddie feels himself blush. “I know, baby,” Richie smiles. 

Eddie takes in a breath that shakes. 

Richie trails his fingers up the bumps of Eddie’s spine lightly, mapping the planes of his back in that dedicated, deliberate way that he’s always touched Eddie with. He drags his fingers along Eddie’s skin and Eddie swears he leaves sparks in his wake. Eddie wishes he would. Eddie wishes he could look in the mirror and see the evidence of Richie on his skin, marks all along his body like comet tails. 

“You could, um…” Richie trails off and Eddie lets him, stroking his fingers through the sweat-damp hair at his temples. Richie’s eyelashes flicker down over his cheeks and then up, and he meets Eddie’s eyes. “I have lube in here. So you could, like. Fuck my thighs. If you wanted to.”

Eddie has to close his eyes for a moment. Calm himself down before he goes off like a fucking rocket at the mere thought of that and is forced to run away into the middle of a snowstorm so he never has to make eye contact with anybody ever again. 

“Yeah,” Eddie rasps eventually, once he can speak without his voice breaking. “Yeah, I want… yes. Please.”

Richie swallows tightly. “Bedside table,” he says. 

He sounds breathless suddenly; he keeps his hands on Eddie as Eddie leans over and snags Richie’s lube out of the drawer, warm and sure, but still shaking slightly. Eddie gets it. Eddie is burning inside, a supernova. 

Whatever intensity had died down during their conversation builds back up now, pressure and heat rising steadily in the pit of Eddie’s stomach. He’s still painfully hard, and it doesn’t take much to see that Richie is, too; Eddie skates a palm up the slight convex of Richie’s stomach, the softness of his chest, and grazes one of Richie’s nipples through his t-shirt. 

Richie’s next inhale skips in the middle. 

“Turn around, sweetheart,” Eddie murmurs, and pats Richie on the hip. It’s unsexy of him, but it doesn’t appear to dampen either of their moods—Richie moves to obey him and Eddie helps them both get situated, Richie ending up on all fours on the mattress, head resting on his folded-up arms. 

“Good,” Eddie says, and kisses the dip at the small of Richie’s back, right beneath the hem of his t-shirt. Richie makes a low, pleased noise at that, and Eddie’s heart wrings itself out like a dishcloth.  _ I love you,  _ Eddie thinks again.  _ I love you, I love you, I love you.  _

The lube is cold even though Eddie tries his best to heat it up in his hands and Richie hisses quietly at the first drizzle of it on the tender skin of his thighs. “Big baby,” Eddie murmurs, but there isn’t anything but fondness in his words, and he’s sure Richie can hear it. Richie hums. Eddie slicks up his own cock and then he scoots forward on his knees, lining up with the tight crease of Richie’s thighs. 

“Ready?” Eddie asks him softly. His heart is pounding right below the surface of his skin. He wants to eat Richie whole. 

Richie would make a joke here, usually, say something quippy and teasing. He doesn't. He breathes in deep, deep enough that Eddie can see it in the rise of his ribs, and says, “Yeah, Eds.” 

Eddie slides in between Richie’s thighs. 

The space is small, held tight by Richie. Richie quivers a little as Eddie fucks into him, going hot all over at the feel of Richie beneath him, warm and soft and tight and so  _ good.  _

“Oh,” he breathes. “God, Richie, baby, you’re so fucking hot. You feel so good, you’re so good, Richie.”

Richie is making noises into the pillow of his arms, not-quite moans that drive Eddie crazy. When Eddie reaches around him and gets a hand on Richie’s cock Richie gasps his name, sounding frayed, sounding close to the edge. 

Immediately, Eddie knows he isn’t going to last long. Richie feels incredible beneath Eddie, Eddie has never loved anybody as much as he loves him— 

“Eddie, I’m gonna—I’m—”

“Yeah, Richie,” Eddie says, his own voice in shreds, “Yeah, baby, come on, come for me, you can do it. Come.”

Richie does, with a sound like a sob. Eddie follows him, draped over Richie’s back, his arms around his middle, his mouth pressed open against the slick, fever-hot skin at the base of his neck. 

The world goes quiet when they’re done. Muffled and slow-moving, like it’s wrapping them up safe. 

They hold each other after, face-to-face in the middle of the mattress, and Eddie catches his breath as Richie nuzzles into the dip of his throat. He’s holding onto Eddie still, tight enough that Eddie notices, his leg hooked around both of Eddie’s with a firm-lulling weight. Tight, like Eddie might still leave. 

Eddie isn’t going to leave. 

He kisses Richie’s crown, soft curls tickling his nose. They’re a mess and Eddie’s cleanliness issues are about to kick in here as soon as this fucked-out combination of laziness and euphoria fades, but for now he is content to just lay still. To just hold Richie. They’ve both always loved that after sex but Richie  _ needs  _ it more than Eddie, and Eddie’s always been more than happy to provide. God he hopes they get to do this again. He hopes he knows what this means— 

That sob again, small and underwrought. Eddie goes still. 

“Richie?” His heart starts to race again. Oh god, he messed up, didn’t he? Hurt him somehow, did something wrong. “Richie, sweetheart, look at me please.”

Richie shakes his head. His mouth grazes Eddie’s throat. “No thanks, Spaghetti,” he manages. 

The stupidest fucking nickname in the history of the world and it still makes Eddie’s insides feel like a crime scene. “Are you ok? I can hear you crying down there.”

He looks up finally, eyes red and cheeks red and there  _ are  _ tears on his cheeks, and Eddie feels run through. Richie’s glasses are still on, slipped halfway down his face and crooked; Eddie fixes them quietly, stomach gone tight with guilt. 

“Jesus, Eds,” Richie mutters at him. His eyelashes are dark and wet, stuck together in short feathered spikes. “Can’t a guy sob after sex with his ex-boyfriend in peace?”

Eddie ignores the quip. “Did I—are you alright?” he asks again. Richie’s skin is hot. “Did I hurt you? I’m sorry, maybe we shouldn’t have…”

“Oh, god, Eddie my love,” Richie says. He catches Eddie’s hand where it’s hovering over his cheek and holds it there, pressed down gentle. His tears dampen Eddie’s palm. “You were… perfect.” He smiles, and while it’s wet it isn’t weak. “Talented brilliant incredible amazing show stopping spectacular never the same totally unique—”

“Ok, Gaga,” Eddie says. He sags with relief. Kisses Richie’s forehead without thinking about it. “I get the point.” 

Richie closes his eyes, smile still in place. It’s good to hear him making jokes. As bad as they are, they’re Richie, and Eddie’s missed him. All of him. 

“I’m just a little overwhelmed,” Richie says honestly. “Nothing for five years and then—and then. But I’m glad we did. And I… god, I missed you.”

Eddie wonders if Richie saying that will ever feel less like his heart’s being carved out of him.

“Missed you too,” Eddie murmurs.  _ Love you,  _ Eddie thinks. “Don’t wanna let you go.”

Richie smiles at him, the sleepy kind of smile that pulls at his cheeks and crinkles his eyes, and he’s so fucking sweet and Eddie’s done in. “Don’t have to.”


	2. Chapter 2

Richie lays on his side, still, staring at the wall across from him. 

He’s pretty sure he hasn’t slept all night. Eddie is behind him for the first time in five years. 

He’s got an arm hooked around Richie’s waist and one pillowed beneath his neck, a hand possessively curved over the softness of Richie’s belly, slipped up underneath the fabric of his t-shirt like it’s no big thing. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s totally normal to no-strings-attached spoon your ex after you no-strings-attached fucked his naked goddamn thighs while you’re snowed in at your friend’s lovely winter wonderland cabin. Maybe Richie’s the weird one. Probably Richie’s the weird one. 

Richie thinks through the situation as pale-gray morning light seeps in through the cracks in the curtains, as Eddie’s hand moves lazily over the fuzz on his stomach. Eddie seemed stressed to be in the same place as Richie when he arrived yesterday. Eddie spent as much time as he could away from Richie for the first few hours, and then Richie made an ass of himself and spilled his feelings on the floor between them like so much blood and Eddie had touched him, told Richie he didn’t hate him. Eddie had smiled at him in the kitchen, but Eddie had yelled at him in the living room, and both of those moments had been true. 

Eddie had come into Richie’s room and kissed him and told Richie that he missed him and after that Richie’s brain had pretty much entirely checked out, done collecting cognizant information for the day. Possibly the rest of the year. 

Richie loves him. They aren’t together.

That’s what Richie knows. 

Eddie shifts gently against Richie’s back now, nosing through the curls at the nape of Richie’s neck. His hand meanders over Richie’s skin, over the curves of his stomach and his hips; it dips down toward the waistband of his boxers, and Richie’s eyes slam closed for almost the first time all night.

“Mm…” his voice is low, sleep-soft. He breathes humid on Richie’s skin and Richie shivers, something gut-deep and unstoppable. “Morning.”

Richie presses back into Eddie on instinct, needing his warmth, needing to touch him in every way, as much as possible. He isn’t surprised when he feels Eddie hard against his ass. It sends a shock of heat through him anyway. 

This morning is stretched slow as treacle, and Richie is hazy and wrung-out with no sleep, Richie is warm beneath these covers, in these arms. He lets himself breathe out. Lets it flutter in his chest. 

“Morning, Eds Spagheds,” he murmurs. 

Richie can feel Eddie’s huff of a laugh skating over the back of his neck. Eddie pinches his side in delicate admonition and then soothes it over with a stroke of his palm, rocking his hips gently forward even as his hand slips back beneath Richie’s waistband. “Not my fuckin’ name, asshole,” he says on a rasp, and then, touching Richie every place but the place Richie wants him, needs him, “This ok?”

“Yeah,” Richie gets out, “Eddie, yeah, yes.”

Eddie hums again, a hitch in the middle this time. Grinds forward, and takes Richie’s cock in his hand. 

It doesn’t take long for either of them. 

After, Eddie rolls away. Richie feels the drag of his palm as his arm falls aside. 

“Jesus,” Eddie breathes. His breath is coming fast. “Jesus Fucking Christ.”

Richie is still on his side, come going sticky and cold between his legs, chest straining with every heartbeat. He hasn’t even seen Eddie’s face yet this morning. He wants to turn over and tuck himself into Eddie’s chest but he isn’t sure that he’s allowed. He wants a lot of things he isn’t sure he’s allowed to have. 

“I feel fucking disgusting,” Eddie says. 

Richie laughs shakily into his pillow, holding onto the edge of his sheet tight so he doesn’t reach back and grab any part of Eddie he can get his hands on. So now he’s gotten off with his ex he’s still in love with  _ twice  _ in the span of about nine hours. Everything’s really coming up Richie. “That was so embarrassing for you, dude,” he says. His voice is bottomed-out and tired. “I can’t believe you just came in your pants like that.”

“Yeah, ok, fuck off,” Eddie mutters, and suddenly he’s touching Richie again: leaning over him to get to the box of tissues on the bedside table, it seems like, but it’s  _ something _ . His skin is warm on Richie’s. It feels a little like a caress, and a little like a burn. “Those sounds you make are sexy as hell. Couldn’t help it.”

Richie fights it, but his face goes warm at that, his insides go liquidy like a scoop of ice cream dropped into a boiling pot. God, he’s easy. He presses his cheek down into his pillowcase, hands clenched tight. 

He expects Eddie to pull back, to clean himself up first—but he doesn’t. He drops a kiss to Richie’s cheek as he reaches down between his thighs, gently enough that Richie doesn’t flinch, before moving onto himself. 

“Still don’t know how to take a compliment, I see,” Eddie murmurs. He tosses the dirty tissues into the wastebasket by the door and makes the shot easily. Even that is weirdly hot. Richie is sick in the goddamn head. 

Eddie is leaning over him still, one arm propping him up on the edge of the mattress, hand splayed by Richie’s hip. It would only take a little shifting for him to fold down on top of Richie, press him chest-to-chest into the sheets. Richie could hook his palms around the back of Eddie’s neck and tug him here. 

“Nobody gives ‘em like you, Eddie baby,” he says, and it’s true. Nobody’s ever been able to get under Richie’s skin like Eddie does; to unstitch the seams of his heart, to light him up like a fucking comet. “You’re lethal.”

Eddie smiles at him. It’s sliding, and it’s slow, and the last thing Richie sees is the darkness of Eddie’s eyes, half-hooded, before he leans down and takes Richie’s mouth with his. 

They kiss for a long, long time. 

Eddie is good at it—always has been. He’s an enchanting blend of bossy and downright considerate: not afraid to put Richie where he wants him but equally as willing to change his course if Richie doesn’t like where things are headed. There is a single-minded determination to every single thing Eddie does, and it shines through bright as a floodlight when he kisses somebody. When he kisses Richie. 

Richie missed a lot of things about Eddie these past five years. Being kissed by him doesn’t exactly rank low on the metaphorical list. 

“Gotta take a shower,” Eddie mutters now, between biting the hook of Richie’s jaw and dragging his mouth along the edge of it. It’s an entirely unsexy grumble, bitten out like an afterthought as he marks up Richie’s skin; it turns Richie’s insides to porridge. This is Eddie in bed with him.  _ Eddie,  _ loud and abrasive and tender and strange and simultaneously the worst and best person at pillowtalk that Richie has ever met. 

Eddie, who he missed so much he almost can’t believe he isn’t dreaming right now. 

“You’re so,” Richie starts, and then he can’t finish, can’t work what he really wants to say out from behind the cage of his teeth without first coating it in lies. He holds Eddie close instead: spreads his hands up around the bowl of Eddie’s rib cage, palm over lungs, fingers notched with bone, and breathes him in. 

“Take one with me,” Eddie says, and Richie couldn’t say no if he wanted to. 

*

“They aren’t coming."

Richie is standing by the window, coffee clutched in his hands as he looks out over the yard. It hasn’t stopped snowing since last night, although what’s coming down now coats the ground with considerably less ferocity than yesterday’s storm. There are drifts all the way up the steps of the deck, a couple feet high at least. The trees at the edge of the yard look like mountains themselves. 

“Mike called, and Bev and Stan,” Eddie continues. He comes up to stand beside Richie, shoulder brushing his arm. The whiteness of the snow reflects in his eyes. 

“I figured,” Richie says. There had been a holiday week a couple of years back that they’d all spent in the Motel 6 at the base of the mountain since it was too bad out to make it up to the cabin. That was Richie’s first Loser’s Christmas without Eddie. He’d gotten a room by himself since he was the odd man out, even though Stan and Patty had offered to share, and he’d spent the night getting drunk on shitty whiskey from the liquor store down the street. It hasn’t really gotten easier since then, but it has gotten more familiar. Less of that sharp-aching pain. “How long do you think we’ll be up here?”

Eddie’s gaze cuts to him quickly, and then away. There’s a frown caught in between his eyebrows. 

Richie’s stomach sinks. He’s said something wrong. 

“Couple days at least,” Eddie says. “I don’t…” he hesitates, and Richie watches him come to a decision: watches the resolution firm up the line of his mouth, watches his forehead wrinkle a bit in determination. He slides his palm across the small of Richie’s back and Richie nearly drops his fucking coffee. “I’m not in a hurry to leave.”

It’s instinct to lean into him. “Oh,” Richie says dumbly, tongue thick and heavy in his mouth. 

Eddie looks up at him sideways, chin still firmly parallel to the ground. The heat of his palm bleeds into Richie through his sweatshirt. “Are you?”

Richie wants to kiss him. But Richie isn’t the brave one. 

“No,” he says. He’s gone monosyllabic. Fucking—it’s Caveman Richie time, apparently. 

Eddie has a way of taking a person in. His focus meanders across the plains of Richie’s face slowly, thoroughly; it leaves him reeling. It leaves him feeling like Eddie’s played connect the dots on Richie’s cheeks, on his forehead. 

“Well,” says Eddie, and turns Richie inward with a hand on his hip. “Well, good.”

Eddie kisses him close and brief, the hand holding Richie’s coffee getting caught up between their chests. Eddie runs his thumb up Richie’s jaw as he pulls away. Eddie scratches his fingers through the hair at Richie’s temple. 

“Hey,” he asks him. “Are you ok?”

People used to be surprised when Richie would talk about how sweet Eddie could be with him. How good. Eddie, who has flipped off every single driver in the state of New York, who openly heckled Richie at his own shows when they were together, who uses “baby” and “sweetheart” and “idiot” interchangeably. They just haven’t had a chance to see the soft parts inside of him. He’s like a— 

“You’re like a crab,” Richie blurts. 

Eddie’s hand slips down to curl around the back of Richie’s neck. “Your mind works in mysterious ways,” he says. 

“Like.” God, Richie’s tired. He would take a sip of his coffee but that would mean moving back from Eddie so he could lift his arm, and he isn’t willing to do that. Not willing at all. “You’ve got a hard outside shell and a soft, sweet inside. Your… crab… meat?”

For some wild and unfathomable reason, this hasn’t seemed to put Eddie off. He’s smiling now in fact, hair damp and curling over his ears from their shower, the lines at the corners of his eyes that weren’t there five years ago deepening. Richie thinks he’s so lovely. Richie loves him.

“One of the things that enrages me the most in this world,” Eddie says, “is that I think you are so goddamn funny.”

“I’m not funny,” Richie says, even though there’s some fluttering, not-so-secret part of him that preens under Eddie’s pseudo-praise. “I’m sleep deprived.”

Eddie squints up at him, halting the trajectory his mouth was making back up to Richie’s mouth, which  _ fuck.  _ Richie nearly makes a dismissive noise of frustration, but keeps it in check at the last minute. 

“Why?” he asks sharply. It sounds like he’s accusing Richie of something, but Richie knows he isn’t. “Did you sleep badly last night?”

Richie wants to say  _ yes, Edward, because you, the love of my life and also my ex boyfriend, fucked me into the mattress and aren’t being verbally communicative about it.  _ Instead he says “Uh, sort of?”

“Well do you need to take a nap?” Eddie demands. This is the way he takes care of people: he’s a firecracker of love. 

Or. Well. Richie ought to be careful around that word.

“Actually don’t answer that question, I know you’ll lie, go take a fucking nap,” Eddie says, and then sort of winces, his thumb rubbing a tender, distracting line at Richie’s nape. “Or, well, uh. I guess I can’t tell you what to do.”

“Yes you can,” Richie says immediately, laughing because he’ll melt at Eddie’s feet if he doesn’t, he will dissolve, “I wouldn’t want you to deny your true nature, Eddie my love. Be bossy to your heart’s content. I just might not listen.”

Eddie swats at Richie’s shoulder and then leaves his hand there in a way that feels deliberate. “You asked for it,” he warns. His cheeks are pink. 

Richie wants to wrap himself around all of Eddie’s slender, sharp lines and consume him. Swallow him up like a boa constrictor. Richie feels un-fucking-hinged. 

“Yeah,” Richie says, too soft, “I did.”

They end up on Bill and Mike’s enormous couch again, and Richie goes to stoke the fireplace as Eddie gathers up blankets from the hall closet and dumps them in a pile on one end. 

“We’re gonna watch shitty Christmas movies,” Eddie announces as Richie comes and sits next to him. He leaves a little bit of space between them. Just in case. “So I’ve got something to heckle while you sleep.” 

Richie doesn’t have the heart to tell Eddie that he still probably isn’t going to sleep. But his eyes are heavy and his mouth is unfocused and loose, exhausted, so he just grins as he watches Eddie spread out blankets over both their laps. 

“You always did like to heckle,” he says. 

This room is in the center of the cabin, no windows to let in any natural light; Eddie has turned the overhead light off and left only the lamps and the fireplace for them to see each other by. The room is warm, everything taking on a honey-gold glow. 

Eddie included. He shines when he looks at Richie, edges rounded by the lighting, the atmosphere, Richie’s sleepy eyes. 

“Only because you loved it so much,” Eddie says. “Don’t bother to pretend you didn’t love it.”

Richie shrugs at him, helpless. ‘Course he did. He loved when Eddie came to shows and sat in the audience with a beer and yelled things up at Richie, his face bright from the spill-off of the stage lights since he always liked to sit so close, every singular spec of his focus narrowed in on Richie like he was the only thing to exist. To matter. 

He hated those later months when he’d be on tour somewhere far away, telling jokes to an audience that didn’t contain Eddie Kaspbrak because Eddie Kaspbrak had a job other than following Richie around the country making him feel things.

That’s why they ended things, after all. Richie had to stop taking from him. Had to stop taking so much from Eddie that he grew to resent it. 

“I’m a slut for attention,” Richie says. 

It doesn’t sound as much like a joke as he’d meant for it to and he thinks Eddie can tell—of course Eddie can tell. Eddie’s watching him, his eyes wide and dark, and he isn’t tentative about the way he holds the ball of Richie’s shoulder in his palm. 

“I’ve watched all your specials,” Eddie says. It seems like a non-sequitur on the surface, but it isn’t really. Eddie is quiet, his words passed to Richie with gentle determination. “And all the clips of you on YouTube that I could get my hands on.”

Richie is unmoored by that, untied, the little paper boat of himself set adrift. He doesn’t know why. “I wasn’t very funny there for a bit,” he says, instead of  _ why,  _ or  _ don’t tell me things like that,  _ or  _ I love you so bad it’s gonna choke me to death.  _ “In the beginning. After.”

Mouth soft, Eddie tugs Richie closer, settling him against his chest. He adjusts the blankets accordingly.

Richie thinks Eddie isn’t going to talk for a little while; thinks he might just let that admission of Richie’s sit between them, as bare and as honest as it is. 

But, “You were still funny,” Eddie murmurs. His chin rests atop Richie’s head. “Just sad.”

_ Were you sad?  _ Richie wonders—and this is love: the way he hopes Eddie’s answer is no. The way he wishes Eddie had spent their time apart happy, how Richie had intended him to. 

It feels futile. It feels like they’ve wasted five years. If both of them were miserable apart, why couldn’t they have been miserable together?

Richie meant what he said yesterday: if he could go back in time and do all of this differently, he would. Instantly. No questions asked.

“You know me,” Richie says. He lets his eyes drift closed, lulled by the heat against his skin, by Eddie’s capable hands moving gently through his hair. “I’m just a sad guy.”

Eddie’s mouth on his cheek, his temple. 

“I don’t think that’s true,” Eddie whispers, but Richie is drifting off already. Doesn’t have time to smile. 

*

When he wakes up there’s a woman telling her rich, Hallmark-handsome fiance that she’s going to leave him for Santa Clause’s son on television, and Eddie is laughing so hard he shakes beneath Richie. 

Richie is still for a moment, smile spreading wide across his cheeks as he feels Eddie’s mirth. He’s clearly trying to keep quiet; laughing into Richie’s curls, hands soothing over Richie’s shoulders as if that’ll keep him under. He’s doing a piss-poor job of it, too. Eddie’s always howled like a little hyena when he laughs. Loud motherfucker. 

Richie turns his head a little, still half-asleep, and rubs his cheek on Eddie’s fleece-covered chest. “I should’ve married you, Eds,” he murmurs. 

Eddie goes quiet. 

Richie doesn’t realize, at first, what he’s said. Eyes half open he watches the woman on screen hang up her phone, smile a final kind of smile, slip it into the pocket of the Christmas-red coat she’s wearing. There’s a fake snow machine running in the shot, churning big, chunky flakes down over her shoulders and her hair. 

It hits him slowly, in waves. It hits him, and his breath stops. 

He needs to walk this back somehow. Needs to shake it off. Needs to make it into a joke, wielded with enough force that it knocks all the truth out of the room. 

He can’t. Richie opens his mouth and his tongue is stuck. 

Eddie smooths his hands over Richie’s shoulders, down to the place where his heart beats staccato against his rib cage. “I would’ve liked that,” he says quietly. He winds his fingers up in Richie’s shirt and then lets go, mouth pressed to the crown of his head. “I would have.”

Richie’s jaw is clenched, tight with tension. He’s either going to turn over on his stomach and kiss Eddie until neither of them can breathe or he’s going to throw up in his own lap. Obviously there’s an option he prefers. 

“I think,” he starts, and has to take one breath, has to take two, “I think we would’ve been happy.”

Eddie inhales. “Rich.”

When Eddie says his name like that it nestles down into the soft meat of him. 

“I know,” Richie says, even though he doesn’t. He doesn’t know anything at all. Only that he loves him. “I know—”

“Rich,” Eddie says again, hands insistent. There’s something caught in his voice, like an ache or a want or a sigh. It catches at Richie, too. “I need to be kissing you right now.”

It shakes a laugh loose, one that rattles around in Richie’s chest as he turns over and straddles Eddie’s hips with his thighs. He’s clumsy and ungainly, both with sleep and because of the fact that he’s thirty-five years old and over six feet tall and trying not to fall off of a couch. He doesn’t—he doesn’t really care. Eddie’s words have stuck themselves against his bones like a match, and the flame licks at his skin. 

Eddie looks up at him, steady and round-eyed, his hands on Richie’s hips. There’s some of that awful melancholia in the curve of his mouth that’s been there these past two days—but there’s something gentler, too. It gives Richie hope. 

Richie has to ask him if he feels the same way. 

Just as soon as he’s done kissing him. 

Eddie’s mouth tastes like coffee, faint beneath the regular, intoxicatingly human flavor of him. He tips his chin up and his lips part immediately, giving Richie free range to take anything he wants. 

Richie wants it all. Richie wants everything. 

Richie wants him. 

It’s almost too much. Sitting here on Eddie’s slim thighs, all the open available warmness of him free to touch and to kiss and to bury himself down in, to nose at the soft bend where his neck meets his shoulder and mouth at his salty-sweet skin. 

Richie doesn’t know what to do. How do you make out with the man you’re in love with without letting him know that you’re in love with him? He shivers a little, even though he’s anything but cold, and he kisses Eddie’s collar bone, the dip of his throat, hands clinging at his hip bones. 

“Baby,” Eddie breathes. He’s cupping the back of Richie’s skull, holding him careful, fingers all wound up in his curls. Richie shivers again and Eddie’s other hand strokes down the line of his spine in a long, flat sweep, sending a blush of heat through Richie’s core. 

Eddie touches him like there’s nothing he’d rather do. 

“Come up here,” Eddie murmurs. “Come here, Richie.”

Richie does, moving like a dream. When Eddie kisses him it’s soft, surprisingly chaste: his mouth is closed but the brush of his lips on Richie’s still makes Richie feel terribly, tremblingly warm, his insides churning like a fucking paper-mache volcano. He is going to bubble up, and over. All of this fizzing love inside him is gonna shoot out and stain Eddie’s hands. 

It isn’t—this isn’t anything. This isn’t even the most they’ve done in the past two days. They’re barely even making out. 

Doesn’t matter. Eddie could hold his hand and Richie would feel his chest crack open. 

“Look at you,” Eddie says now. His voice is tucked down in his chest, low and reverent. He cups Richie’s cheek; he drags his thumb across the place where Richie’s skin is probably stained red over his cheekbone. “So fucking pretty.”

“Oh my god,” Richie breathes, unsteady, and grips at Eddie without thinking. “Oh what the fuck.”

Eddie smiles at him. It’s his slow kind of smile, his tilting one, the one that creeps over his face like a sunrise. He hums, warm in the back of his throat. “You like hearing that?”

Richie’s throat is a desert. He shakes his head. He’s fucking lying. 

Eddie trails a fingertip along the arc of Richie’s eyebrow, the bridge of his nose, down. He skims over the seam of his lips, and Richie’s pulse jumps. 

“Too bad.”

Jesus fucking Christ on a goddamn crutch. 

“I like telling you,” Eddie says. He blinks at Richie, heavy-eyed, absolutely evil. If he doesn’t get his mouth on Richie, Richie will die right here. “You look so good. So fucking good when I touch you, when I kiss you.” 

“Eddie baby.” Richie’s voice is shattered.  _ God.  _ Eddie says a handful of words and Richie is coming apart at the seams. “You’re gonna kill me.”

Eddie kisses him again, mouth velvet-soft and burning. He whispers, “You look like you’re mine.”

Richie feels like a violin string. Somebody’s plucked him, set him off quivering from the inside out. He thinks, desperate and embarrassed and totally, inexplicably harder than he’s maybe ever been,  _ I think it’s my turn to come in my pants.  _

“Are you?” Eddie asks him. His hands are beneath Richie’s shirt, roaming over the small of his back, his scapula, around over his ribs and his stomach. He sucks a kiss beneath Richie’s jaw as he waits for an answer; he tweaks the soft place beneath Richie’s belly button when he takes too long. “Are you mine, Rich?”

“ _ Fuck, _ ” Richie rasps, aching and punched out of him. “Yeah, Eddie, Eds, I’m yours.” 

Eddie is smiling when he presses their mouths together again.

This means something. It has to. 

Richie ignores the way his eyes have gone hot, ignores the living thing in his throat that threatens to take him apart. They’re tip-tilting on the edge of something here, and if Eddie tugs him, Richie will fall. 

He doesn’t seem to be doing any more tugging. He gentles Richie with his next few kisses, soft over his bottom lip, the corners of his mouth—the kind that has a handful of butterflies rocketing around in Richie’s stomach. Eddie keeps running his hands up and down Richie’s sides like he just can’t get enough of the feel of him. Up, and down, and up, and down. 

“I feel like I know where this is going,” Richie says. His voice is cracked, not much more than air, and he’d be embarrassed about that too if Eddie had never heard him sound a thousand times more fucked-out than this. “And I gotta say, Eds, that you’re about to give me the biggest case of blue balls anybody’s ever had.”

Eddie laughs into his skin. “I can’t fuck you on this couch,” he says. “Bill and Mike would kill us.”

Richie makes a horrible, longing sort of noise at that. Something about the way Eddie says those words as nonchalantly as if they’re discussing the weather sets Richie ablaze like a cherry bomb. 

“Don’t… don’t fuck me on the couch, then,” he says. He is holding onto Eddie. He might never let go. “Take me to the bedroom and fuck me there.”

Eddie has a hand on Richie’s chest. He pushes him back slightly, enough that Richie sits back on the cushions and Eddie can pull his legs free. 

Richie stares up at Eddie as he stands. His heart’s about to batter its way out of his wrists. 

“Later,” Eddie murmurs, bending down and brushing his mouth over the shell of Richie’s ear, over his forehead. The hand in his hair tugs a little. Richie blinks, slow. “Later, ok? Wanna take my time.”

Richie says, “I’m gonna die in this cabin.”

Eddie smiles. “Not on my watch.”

*

Richie makes food. 

He might be more sexually frustrated than he can remember being since the first time he was pining for Eddie, but that doesn’t mean he’s about to lose his fucking mind and let Eddie Kaspbrak operate the stovetop. He’s horny, not stupid. 

It’s tipping over into a silver kind of afternoon beyond the window above the sink, sky edging closer to black than gray even though it’s barely four. The snow has picked back up somewhat: any trace of their footfalls from yesterday is thoroughly buried, smoothed over by unbroken white, like the surface of an egg. They’re sealed in.

Part of Richie never wants to leave. 

“You look good in that apron.”

“You,” Richie says, turning around and pointing his spatula at Eddie’s sly-smiling face with vigor, “need to shut the fuck up if you don’t want me to pass out on the floor.”

“Don’t want that,” Eddie says, smiling, smiling, and kisses the back of Richie’s neck as he turns back to the frying pan. He’s making them egg sandwiches since neither of them had anything other than coffee for breakfast or lunch, dripping with cheese the way Eddie would never admit to liking when they were together. At the touch of Eddie’s lips, his spine turns to liquid and fucking disappears. 

Eddie fits his palms over Richie’s hips, proprietary enough that Richie could cry, and hooks his chin over Richie’s shoulder. 

“Shit,” Richie swears, and fiddles with the spatula. “Wanna know something?”

“Sure.”

“You’re fucking ruining me, man.”

Eddie kisses him again. The top of his spine, the side of his neck. Holding on. 

*

They eat at the kitchen island even though Eddie says it’s unhealthy to eat standing up, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, making a mess of the marble top. 

“You fucking asshole,” Eddie says when Richie laughs too hard at a story Eddie’s telling him about somebody incompetent at work and drips cheese everywhere. He swats Richie across the top of his arm. Richie’s gut pulls. “This was traumatic for me, bitchface.”

“Eddie when I think about who had it worse in the situation you just described to me, the kid you yelled at for forty-five minutes wins.”

“Richie!” Eddie is, Richie can tell, trying very hard to frown, but the laugh that’s rising out of him is doing a good job tangling his features into something closer to a grudging smile. “He filed everything wrong and  _ then  _ he couldn’t even stand up for himself when I asked him to explain his decision. He’s an idiot  _ and  _ a coward.”

“Oh, shit, I was totally wrong, then,” Richie says, wiping up his cheese and crumbling the napkin down onto his plate. “Like, pick a struggle, right?”

Richie feels incandescent when Eddie glares at him like that. Richie feels—Richie feels like he could level a fucking building. 

“I’m so mad right now,” Eddie says, smiling like a shark. “I want to hit something.”

“Let it out, babe,” Richie says, heart beating sparrow-quick in his throat. 

“I,” says Eddie, and sets his plate down, and kisses him. 

“How is work,” Richie gasps out between Eddie glueing himself to Richie’s front and pressing him back against the first wall they stumble into, “by the way?”

Eddie is paying a lot of attention to Richie’s neck. Sexy little handsy volatile vampire man. “Not worth it,” Eddie grunts, and does something absolutely insane and absolutely sexy and licks across the bump of Richie’s Adam’s apple, what the  _ fuck, _ “Every day I think about how I should’ve just gone with you.”

“Eddie,” Richie says desperately, like someone’s peeled him open, like someone's taken handfuls of him and spread him across the floor, “oh my  _ god. _ ”

“I think we’ve waited long enough,” Eddie breathes. “Right? Yeah?”

Richie can’t talk. He nods fast, and his head bumps up against the wall behind him. 

“Great,” Eddie murmurs, and drags him down the hall. 

Eddie’s bedroom is the first one they come to—Eddie ushers Richie inside seemingly without stopping to think about it, pushing Richie toward the bed that’s sat empty since yesterday evening. It’s still unmade from where he must have climbed out to come into Richie’s room last night, covers turned back and rumpled. Eddie hates leaving his bed unmade, unless he’s got a very important distraction. 

Richie sinks down onto the edge, legs feeling coltish and trembly beneath him. 

“This whole situation is super embarrassing for you,” Richie says, because he’s an idiot who doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up. “You couldn’t resist kissing me last night, you came in your pants this morning, you couldn’t last an hour without glomming onto me this afternoon. Guess I’m just irresistible.” 

Eddie laughs hot air into the dip of Richie’s clavicles, hands skating up beneath the front of his sweatshirt as he does. “Guess you’re just irresistible,” he agrees. There’s a specific blend of sarcasm and honesty in his voice that lights Richie’s skin on fire, blush trailing down his cheeks and neck and chest—

The chest that Eddie has his mouth on now, one knee between Richie’s on the bed, spine dipped down so he can bite and lick at the swell of Richie’s pecs. There’s lava in Richie’s stomach. He brings a hand up to cradle the back of Eddie’s head—instinct—and holds him there. 

Eddie makes a quiet, satisfied noise, sinking forward and kissing up Richie’s neck until he meets his mouth again. 

The air stretches, slows. 

Quiet between them. Nothing but the humid sounds of Richie’s breath. 

It’s different than last night. Last night felt fervent and fervid and desperate, something they tripped and fell into, something unstoppable. But now… every time Eddie touches him it feels like a choice. Every time Richie touches back, it is one. There’s tenderness in the spaces between their bodies; as much as there is in the press of their mouths, the way Eddie’s hands settle into the dip of Richie’s waist as if they were made to rest there. 

It aches every time Richie breathes in. He feels like soft wet tissue, stretched and fragile. He feels like if someone held him up to the light, they could see right through. 

“I wanna fuck you,” Eddie rasps. He has pushed Richie onto his back on the mattress, straddling his hips in a mirrored echo of the position they’d been in earlier in the afternoon, and the easy, firm weight of him slows Richie’s heart rate down molasses-thick in his chest. He kisses Richie deep, shifting upward so their erections brush, evident through the soft thin material of their sweatpants. Lightning strikes through Richie. Swift, absolute. “Can I? Can I fuck you, baby?”

“Obviously,” Richie says, voice unsteady, and cants his own hips upwards—fuck. Fuck, that feels good. Eddie’s hands tighten on him slightly like a reprimand, but that isn’t exactly a downside. “Obviously I want you to fuck me, Eds, please, please…”

He doesn’t mean for it to devolve into begging there at the end but he feels entirely helpless over whatever comes out of his mind, knows it isn’t really in his control anymore if he speaks or just trembles here silently. Eddie’s always been able to do that. Get Richie out of his head so completely that he runs his mouth nonsensically or is literally fucked into speechlessness. 

Eddie’s one of the only people Richie has ever been comfortable being quiet around. That means something; that definitely means something. 

Richie is too fucking riled up to figure out what right now. Maybe after he gets off. 

“Thank you,” Eddie says, weird and polite only when he cares to be and lovely, always lovely, and Richie can’t help but laugh. It’s a half-formed breath of a thing, something that gets caught behind this tangled snarl of love in his throat, but it’s there. Eddie smiles at him for it, eyes hooded, grinning with teeth. “Dickhead,” he mutters. 

“I—” Richie swallows the rest of the phrase.  _ I love you, I love you.  _ “That’s me,” he finishes weakly. 

He feels Eddie’s smile pressed to his skin, and then Eddie slips off of him and stands. 

Richie doesn’t mean to react to that. He doesn’t. But his lap feels empty when Eddie moves away and his hands fall lonely to rest on the mattress and he makes a noise in his chest, small and disgruntled and much too close to a whine. 

Eddie glances at him. In the half-dark of the bedroom, his skin is rose gold. His throat moves on a swallow; his eyelashes flutter over his cheekbones. 

God, he’s gorgeous. Richie’s gonna choke. 

“Come back,” he says. 

Eddie’s face goes soft, his eyes wide, eyebrows sloped gentle, but he doesn’t do as Richie says. “Take your clothes off, Rich,” he murmurs. 

Sometimes Richie thinks he would fall all over himself to make Eddie happy. He wriggles his sweatpants and his underwear off in a movement free of grace and reaches for his sweatshirt next, tugging it over his head with unsteady hands. It bumps up against his glasses and for a moment he’s blind, his tongue honey-stuck in the cradle of his jaw. 

And then Eddie’s hands are on his wrists. He moves Richie’s arms to his sides and works his sweatshirt carefully over his head, stroking Richie’s curls as he goes. 

Richie blinks up at him, shivering a little as air skates across his bare skin. 

Eddie stands naked before him, still tracing his fingertips against the grain of the hair at Richie’s temples. It sends electricity down his spine. He kisses Richie sweetly, close-mouthed and soft, right over the seam of his lips. 

“Glasses on or off?” Eddie asks. 

The words are caught for a moment; Richie can do nothing but look at him, reeling his wild thoughts in hand over fist. “On,” he says at last, voice like scraping at the bottom of a barrel. “Wanna see you.”

Eddie’s heart pulses golden at his throat. 

Richie blinks, and he’s leaning back, and Eddie’s sliding a pillow beneath his hips, and Eddie’s kissing the soft place at the inside of his knee with his eye lowered, reverent as if there is something in Richie that deserves to be revered. Richie blinks, and Eddie’s saying something to him but the words are just a murmured line of reassurance under the rush of blood in Richie’s ears, and when Eddie slides a slicked-up finger inside of him he moans. 

Eddie stills that hand, the other soothing over Richie’s hip and stomach. “You alright, Rich?”

“Yeah,” Richie breathes. Every note of him sings. “Just—easy. ‘S been a while.”

Eddie has a way of tilting his chin, of angling his eyes so that Richie feels completely hollowed out. Feels seen through. Eddie asks him, low, “How long?”

Richie swallows on a dry throat. Eddie curls the finger inside of him as he waits for an answer, fucks Richie shallowly, gently. Richie shuts his eyes. 

He’s sure Eddie knows exactly how long. God, it’s probably written all over him that he hasn’t been able to get past a few anonymous, drunken handjobs in the bathrooms of bars with anybody since Eddie—that he hasn’t wanted to. That sometimes he goes home to his empty bedroom and fucks himself on his own fingers and thinks about Eddie, his steady hands and his dark eyes and his sharp mouth, and forgets for a moment that he isn’t there. 

It’s pathetic. 

“Eds,” Richie murmurs, voice catching. “Don’t make me say it.”

Eddie adds a second finger, slow and unrelenting, and Richie holds back this snarl of something in his chest. 

“Look at me, sweetheart,” Eddie murmurs. Richie shakes his head, and Eddie sweeps his thumb across Richie’s hipbone, kisses his knee again. “Look at me, Rich.”

Richie does. 

Eddie is unwavering. “How long?”

Richie’s voice is gone, a tendril of air; it takes him two tries before he’s audible, and even then Eddie leans in to hear him. “Not since you,” he confesses. He’s never said it out loud before. His face burns red, and arousal pulses low and coiling in his belly. “Nobody—nobody since you, Eddie baby. I didn’t, I couldn’t...”

Eddie hits his prostate now, three fingers deep; Richie grinds down onto his hand, lost to it. There’s no point in being embarrassed now that he has a truth like that out there. 

“God, Rich.” Eddie licks his red mouth, tongue flashing pink beyond the barrier of his teeth. His eyes are dark, dazed. Richie wants to kiss him desperately. “I can’t believe you’re real. You’re fucking perfect, baby, so perfect and so good for me—”

“Eddie,” Richie gasps. “Please fuck me. Please, please.”

Eddie laughs a little, breathless and on the edge. He slips his fingers out of Richie—Richie whimpers at the loss, feeling empty again and hating it—and he surges upwards, kissing Richie deep. 

It slows down the thump of Richie’s heart like it always does. Centers him. 

“Ok,” Eddie says quietly. He kisses the curve of Richie’s eyebrow, his chin, his neck, the center of his chest, his stomach. He kisses Richie’s hip. “Ok, Richie, baby, hold on.”

Richie can’t do anything but that. He counts his breaths as he listens to the sounds of Eddie rolling a condom on, of the lube bottle clicking. 

He watches Eddie stroke himself a few times, head bent. Eddie is radiant. 

“I missed you,” Eddie tells him again as he arranges Richie with careful, considerate hands—as he slides inside slow enough for Richie to feel it like an ache in the back of his jaw. Eddie’s exhale skitters over Richie’s collar bone; he holds himself over Richie with an arm that shakes a little, forehead creased. “Missed you every goddamn day. Couldn’t touch anybody else for how much I missed you.”

There is a sob building inside of Richie, jagged. He gasps again instead, reaching blindly for Eddie’s hand. 

Eddie gives it to him. He laces their fingers together, and then he starts to move.

“Eds,” Richie says. He’s begging again, and he doesn’t know what for. Eddie is fucking him with deep, even rolls of his hips, lighting Richie up brighter than a fucking Christmas tree, and Richie feels moments from shaking apart. He touches Eddie’s hip, his ear, the place where sweat has collected in the dip between his scapula; he wavers on an edge. 

“You feel so good,” Eddie murmurs. “God, you feel beautiful.”

The praise makes Richie’s eyes hot. He’d close them again, but he refuses to miss this: the way Eddie bites a line of little white indents in his bottom lip, the ungelled, fluffy mess of his hair falling down into those dark eyes, the shining line of his neck, the way he gazes down at Richie like he means every word he says. 

_ I was put here to make you look like that,  _ Richie thinks. 

Eddie kisses Richie as he drives into him. It’s hot and wet and messy and Richie can’t breathe anyway, so he may as well suffocate here in the hollow of Eddie’s mouth. He may as well never come back up at all. 

Eddie thumbs at the tender inside of Richie’s wrist. Eddie breaks the kiss off with a low, punched sort of noise, and Eddie slams his hips forward. 

“Beautiful,” Eddie says again. “Fuck, Richie—” and he loses his rhythm, and Richie is holding his hand so tightly it must hurt, “Rich, god, I love you.”

Richie’s orgasm rips into him out of nowhere. 

He bows up off the mattress and into Eddie and Eddie kisses him through it, kisses him rough, his words ringing in Richie’s ears even as he murmurs new ones against the hook of Richie’s jaw. He keeps fucking Richie even as his legs shake with the aftershocks—until he flinches from the oversensitivity of it, the hand in Eddie’s hand spasming tight.

Eddie stills, but Richie doesn’t want that. Richie won’t let him. He says “Finish,” and he doesn’t recognize his own voice; it’s wrecked, slurred and half-broken. “Come on, Eddie baby, come in me, come  _ on. _ ”

Eddie doesn’t have to be told twice. 

Richie holds him, head thrown back on the pillows as Eddie’s hips stutter forward.  _ I love you,  _ Eddie had said, looking at Richie like it was true.  _ I love you,  _ he said, like he used to, like they’d never made that stupid, rushed decision, like— 

Eddie comes with a shout. He collapses down onto Richie’s chest when he’s done, curling into Richie like he belongs there. 

_ I love you. I love you.  _

His heart must be loud enough for Eddie to hear, battering the inside of his ribcage like it is. Richie thinks he’s still holding onto Eddie. He thinks his hands are carding through his hair and touching all the miles of his skin and keeping him close, close, but his brain feels like somebody’s dropped a bomb in there and left him to sort through the senseless rubble. He swallows, mouth dry, and stairs up at the shadowy ceiling beams.

Eddie’s lips on Richie’s skin. One hand fitted around Richie’s waist, beneath his back and the mattress. He hasn’t pulled out yet. Richie blinks, and his eyes burn. 

“That was insanely sexy,” Eddie mumbles. His lips graze Richie’s chest as he speaks, light enough to make Richie’s heart rate ratchet up another couple miles per hour. “Richie, what the fuck.”

Here’s where he’s supposed banter back. Richie knows this, it’s practically his fucking job. 

He can’t speak. 

When he’s quiet for too long, Eddie raises himself up again to look at him. There’s a sliver of a frown between his eyebrows and Richie hates that, hates that he made Eddie unhappy before he could even open his mouth and answer him. 

“Are you ok?” Eddie asks him softly, thumbing over his cheekbone, and Richie hates  _ this,  _ too: that every time they’ve had ill-advised but mind-blowing sex on this trip Eddie has had to rescue him from a mental breakdown afterward. “Richie?”

“Just—just overwhelmed again,” Richie lies, feeling that third blow of hate turned swiftly inwards. “You make me feel so good, Eds.”

Eddie doesn’t look like he quite believes him but he smiles anyway, small and dimpled in one corner of his mouth. He kisses Richie again and they both hiss as he pulls out. 

Every atom of Richie’s body feels exhausted, half from panic and half from the oragasm that just tore into him like a dog into a bone. He came because his ex boyfriend told him he loved him in the heat of the moment. He came  _ without being touched  _ because Eddie said  _ I love you.  _ He has reached previously untapped levels of pathetic-ness. 

Richie listens to Eddie move around the room, eyes sunk shut. He feels Eddie clean the spunk off his stomach with a warm washcloth and then reaches for him on instinct when he’s done, tugging him back down into the bed. 

Eddie twines himself with Richie easily. Arms around waists, legs over legs. 

Outside, the wind howls. 

“Eddie,” Richie murmurs. 

He thinks: oh god. It’s happening. He can’t open his eyes. 

Eddie answers in a rumbling hum, dozy and content and golden-slow. He’s dragging one fingertip in a little circle over Richie’s shoulder, idle. 

It hurts to breathe. Richie says, “Did you, um. Did you say you loved me?”

His hand goes still. A breath—and Eddie lifts his head, frowning like Richie just insulted him and everything he believes in. He says, indignantly, “Yeah?"

“Fuck me upside down,” Richie breathes. 

Eddie scrambles to be sitting up, the sheets falling down to pool in his lap. He looks like some sort of lovely, untouchable god in nothing but the yellow lamplight; he stares at Richie, and his eyes are black from that far above. 

After a moment, the tight line of Eddie’s mouth goes slack, drawing itself into a gentle O. “Rich,” he says tightly. “Did you—are you—I thought that was clear.”

Richie’s hands are shaking so bad he can’t push up his glasses—his very worst tell. He sits up too, feeling big and unsightly, unable to hide his naked body back beneath the sheets Eddie’s got in a vice grip. He crosses his arms over his chest and says, “You said it yourself, Eds,” voice cracking down the center. “We—we broke up.”

There isn’t any of that malleable tenderness in the air between them anymore. Richie’s face is burning, but his wet stomach is cold. 

Eddie blinks at him, a series of very fast movements. “Richard,” he says, sounding strained. “When I fucked you into the mattress our first night here did you not get a clue?”

Richie wants to laugh but he still feels like an egg, dropped onto the sidewalk from a great height. Fissured all over with cracks. “I don’t know,” he says, voice infuriatingly small. “Eddie, I didn’t—maybe you just couldn’t resist my hot dad bod,” he tries, but he can tell by how enormous Eddie’s eyes have gotten that the joke didn’t land. “I dunno, I don’t—I don’t know if it means you still… or if you just wanna get off and jettison back home when we can leave. I don’t  _ know. _ ”

There is heat in his chest, his throat, the back of his eyes, and he  _ hates  _ it. 

“Richie,” Eddie says, and he looks  _ hurt _ , and Richie is going to fucking. Cry or something. “I love you more than should even be possible.”

Fuck. Fuck, that does it. 

Richie sobs very quietly into the palm of his hand, but Eddie notices anyway. Of course he does. His eyebrows crash in a tragic sort of line above the bridge of his nose and he crawls forward to fit himself beneath Richie’s legs, his own eyes going glassy with tears. 

He says, “Fuck, I thought you knew, I thought—I never stopped loving you, Richie,” and holds Richie’s face in his palms. “I’ve regretted leaving you every single day for five years. I—I’d move back in with you in a heartbeat. You idiot, I thought you could  _ see. _ ”

Richie just shakes his head, helpless. He wants Eddie to crush him down small and never let him go. “I—does that mean… did you know about me? Did you know I still loved  _ you? _ ”

Eddie’s lips part. “Well,” he says, a little wild, “Well, Rich, I mean—you told me you should have  _ married me, _ ” he splutters, face going scarlet, and god, god Richie missed him. “I think it was a natural conclusion to jump to!” 

Richie’s laughing too hard to answer. He feels like there’s a hot air balloon inside him, swelling up fast, and he’s about to float away with Eddie in his basket. He feels incandescent. 

“Oh, fuck you,” Eddie says, but he’s smiling so wide that the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes catch the rest of his tears. “I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Yeah, Eds,” Richie says. He smiles. He brings Eddie’s hand up to his mouth and he kisses it sweet and slow, reveling in the way Eddie’s blush darkens. “Yeah, you fucking narcissist. I love you so much I could die with it.”

Eddie slips his arms around Richie’s neck, kissing his temple. “Shit, baby,” he murmurs. “Don’t do that.”

*

Stan calls Richie on the afternoon of the next day. “You’re still alive,” he says, instead of hello. 

Richie, who is currently being spooned by Eddie in the bed they gave up and crawled back into sometime after lunch, smiles. “You could sound a little more excited, Stangelina.”

“Why would I be excited about that?” Stan asks, blank, and then, “Seriously though. Are you doing ok? I know things can’t be… easy.”

Eddie kisses the nape of Richie’s neck. Richie says, “Stan, you will never guess what I’m doing right now.”

There is a beat of silence from Stan’s end of the line. Eddie shakes gently behind Richie, muffling his laughter in Richie’s skin, and Richie smiles so hard he thinks his face might split. 

“Eddie says hi, by the way,” Richie adds slyly. 

“Fuck me,” Stan says. 

“Ooo, language, Stan the Man!” Richie crows, laughing when he hears Patty’s muffled  _ I knew it!  _ in the background. 

“You better not be having sex right now, Richie,” Stan warns, and he’s obviously trying to sound stern, but Richie can hear the answering smile in his voice. “I would be so displeased.”

“How dare you,” Richie sniffs. “I’m being cuddled by the love of my life,  _ Stanley,  _ get your mind out of the gutter.”

Eddie kisses him again for that one, lips lingering. Richie’s shivers, burrowing back deeper into the circle of his arms. 

“You two actually talked things through?” Stanley asks, and Richie should probably be offended at the surprise in his voice, but then again they did have sex three times before they discussed anything, so maybe it’s fair to be shocked. “Patty says she’s happy for you, by the way.”

“Tell Patty I love her,” Eddie mumbles. 

“We love you too, Eddie,” Stan says. 

“What am I?” Richie asks, smiling, smiling, “chopped liver?”

“You're the love of Eddie’s life,” Stan says reasonably. 

Eddie’s hands roam up the front of Richie’s t-shirt. “Damn right,” he says. 

“Yeah.” Richie turns over in Eddie’s hold so he’s facing him, inches away on the same pillow. Eddie curls his fingers into Richie’s hair. “I win.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and then the snow clears up and they meet the losers at the motel at the base of the mountain and they go home together and get two dogs and live happily ever after 
> 
> i'm on twitter @unicornpoe and i'd love to yell w you

**Author's Note:**

> :) 
> 
> i am on twitter @unicornpoe saying many evil things


End file.
